Secret lovers killed in dead of night: Greg Haddrick Pt.1

The public has had a long held fascination with detectives. Detective sy a side of life the average persons never exposed her. I spent thirty four years as a cop. For twenty five of those years I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw

It's great to see you again too. Been a couple of years, Yes it has been. Yeah, always good to see.

You well, no doubt you've been busy and yeah, no rest for the wicked, so to speak. No. I finished your book In the Dead of the Night, and I've got to say it is you've really encapsulated what the murder investigation is about, which is not surprising given the projects you've worked on before. But it's a fascinating story, isn't it.

It is and that was actually what drew me to it, that to be able to get inside a homicide investigation which was so difficult, and be able to bring an audience or readership inside that investigation, to give them the feeling of what it is like at each moment as they're going through it. It was the real incentive behind writing it.

Well, you've done it very well, and you've traumatized the next homicide detective who was sitting reading the book and thinking, I'd love to get involved in this investigation, because it really started with nothing, nothing, which was unusual.

What I've heard was that in this day and age, usually there's you know, people have phones on them, or there's CCTV not too far away, or there's you know someone it's someone close to the person involved, et cetera. There's places they can start the middle of the one and Gator Valley had no phone reception, there were no cameras, there was no one who knew Russell and Carroll anywhere within two hundred kilometers of the site. They had no idea where to start.

It was a classic murder mystery, wasn't it. Yeah, when we'll talk in detail and we'll take it through chronologically how the investigation evolved. But it brought back old school detective thinking. Yeah, little red flags, little indicators that you couldn't hang a case on it, but you're thinking, Okay, this doesn't quite add up. That's why I found fascinating about it.

Yeah, and that's and a lot of that was circumstantial, but thread by thread they built it up. And the way I heard it described is they felt they needed to get enough threads that you couldn't break the rope.

Yeah, that's a good way of a good way of describing. I think there was something in your book and one of the detectives we're talking that's like trying to put the jigsaw together when you haven't got the pitch.

You haven't got the cover, which I thought was a good.

Analogy and sort of added to it. What is it you think about true crime that fascinates fascinates people? Look, there's a few answers.

And because I've puzzled about this for now, you know, fifteen odd years, tight years, and I think there's one aspect is to feel safe, people feel they need to understand exactly what happened, and if they do understand what the motivation was, what drove that particular murder to happen, crime to happen. Then they can go, oh, well, I can avoid, I can feel safe. I know that wouldn't happen to me because of A, B and C. I

And that affects all.

Our daily lives with how we deal with other people, and true crime just heightens that, takes that and puts it on steroids.

Well, it makes you question your own morals and values, doesn't it. It does when you're looking at how the impact that crime has in society. Yeah, what about yourself? What's your interest in? And we will talk a little bit about your career before we get into the murder investigation. But you, in your professional career have covered a lot of crime stories and delivered it on TV and different forums.

That's right, And I think what's kept me interested? I mean there's a and again it's no one simple answer. There is a strand where it's commercially rewarding to do true crime because you know you have an audience, but beyond that, for me, it did have to do with morality. I mean, I've done quite a few legal shows as well, and they're fairly close. You're always dealing with, you know, what is suffering?

How do you relieve it?

How do society become a safer place for human beings to live in? Those big questions about you know, where are we safe and what do we have to do to make ourselves safe? I think are constantly on the top of everyone's mind.

Okay, your career told us a little bit about yourself before we delve into the murder.

Well, I was at university before media communication courses really existed, So I did English honors and then came out not sure, you know, I wanted to use that in some creative way, whether that was going to be authorship, which has taken me thirty five forty years to do, or journalism or whatever. And it just so happened that the first paying job by God was in television, and I was lucky. I seemed to suit it and it worked well. New doors kept on opening up, it never got boring, and so

Yeah. Well, you your resumey of shows that you've been involved in is quite impressive. And when they talk about unemployed writers or actors, you seem to keep yourself busy. I have.

Yeah, I've been like I guess, yeah, there's an element of luck, and I guess an element of being in the right place at the right time.

Yeah. Well, the Underbelly TV series, and obviously it's personal to me, and we'll talk about the Underbelly badness, but the Underbelly series, the series one with the Melbourne Underworld that that really, I don't know, it seemed to really exploded.

Yeah, that was that was an absolute breakout hit. And that's the I've been involved with many successful shows, and there's what It's one thing being a success, it's another thing being being a real breakout hit, which it was in Australia.

And we.

That the genesis of that first season of Underbelly was really because Eddie Maguire had absolute control Channel nine for about six months.

And he was fascinated by it. He was he was a broady boy.

He knew that world. He always thought it would be hugely popular. You know, a lot of other people weren't quite so sure when we when we first started it was I was lucky that one of the one of the cops who under the radar helped me with Society Murders was then on taskwas Paranha. So the link to Underbelly from Channel nine's point of view was Andrew Ruhlan and John Sylvester, and the link from my point of view was the operational cops in taskwors Parana who we had some help with.

They really helped well again watching it and it sort of changed the way a story was told. And like the Melbourne Underworld murders, that series encapsulated the way it's reported factually is one thing that then seeing the characters play out and the personalities and yeah, it was a world of crime that I sort of understood, like that some of them are larger than life without glorifying them, that's just the way they are.

And you know, Carl Williams was larger than life even though he walked around in track he's and made a red rooster. Yeah, and yet he was Everyone liked him, and he became the boss of that gang. And so order you to sort of present that and go, look, this is part of our society. These people are living next door to you.

I think it also played out how things can escalate in that world, like it was a tit for tat and it just kept going bigger and bigger. It was crazy. I remember one sitting down talking to you one time, and we won't name the name of the person, but I reference this because I think it's quite funny where one of the villains that you were portraying on their approached you and you might recall it, but it stuck with me that said, I don't do litigation through the courts, yes,

It was yeah, yeah, and you know, with a smile, and yet you go, I can see you smiling, but.

That very very chilling. Yes, well, you came crashing into my life with Underbelly badness, and it'd be amiss of me if I didn't raise it, because I think it had an impact on my life. People can judge whether it's a good impact or a bad impact, but how our world's collided with that. I think you were speaking

That was our I mean, if you if you backtrack to the first and I think Badness was that's one of the ones I'm most proud of as well. I thought we did. You know, it was a very good show and it did very very well because there was a lot of emotional connection to all of the characters in that the goodies and the badies, because of the depth we put into that characterization. If you go back to the to the famous first aes of Funderbilly the Crims in that were probably more complex than the cops.

Yeah, and look, yeah I was confronting as it was. I think I was in the fetal position, sucking the thumb watching the first episode. You asked me if I want to see it before it came out, and I thought, no, some plausible denying ability, but that is the price that you pay with policing. And yeah, I'm not ashamed of what my life is, but it's played out warts and all and the impact that has and I think it gave the public an understanding of what it takes to

Yet ultimately victorious in that case against some you know, a lot of badness.

Yeah well and yeah, well it was. It turned out to be a great investigation and one that I'm proud of and I made a good friend from it. Matt Nabel who You've got to play me? And I think you picked the right person. We're good friends and he got because that was my When you approach and everyone is this way, and I don't care what they say, but when you say, oh, they're going to do a TV show on you're a movie or whatever, the first question you want to ask is who's going to play me?

And the flow on from Crownies, and I think Crownies is one of the shows that is age really well at the time.

The ABC.

It's no great secret that their majority of their audience is you know, forty five fifty class, So it was no great surprise at the end of that first year is they went well our audience, They did their research and they said, our audience is actually responding more to Janet than they are to the twenty somethings, and so we re engineered it to put that character at the center.

Well, you know, it's a world that I understand, and I think you captured the essence of it. Yeah, people sometimes people say, but does that happen? Well, it's not a docu mentory like there's yeah, there's some creativity in there, but the essence of what it's about. And that's where when people ask me about Underbelly Badness, I captured the

And I often say, even going back to the first Underbelly, when people ask the question, generally speaking, the more outrageous things that you can't believe, the more likely it is it's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well it's interesting and full credit to you. But having read the book in the

The moral dilemmas. I had so many ethical and moral dilemmas. That is the norm for a homicide investigation. So we're going to talk about it, but before we do, in respect to the victims, because when we're talking homicide, we're talking about the lives of two people. Can you tell us who Russell Hill was? And Carol Clay will start off with Russell.

Look a little bit. What I know about Russell was that he had been a logger and a forestry worker in the One and Gata Valley for a lot of his life. He then, toward the later years, drove trucks, mostly for bunnings or for things to and from for their timber divisions and all of that sort of stuff. He'd relatively recently retired. He had always loved the outback and the outdoors. Sometimes his wife Robin had gone with him. Many times he'd sort of gone on his own.

He was also.

A very big radio enthusiast high frequency radio, and there was a group of about half a dozen also mates that he contacted quite regularly through high frequency radio, and they kept in touch when any of them knew they were out in the books because there's no farm reception, yeah or whatever, so he'd set up an aerial and make sure he checked in, you know, six o'clock most evenings.

And at the time of his disappearance, he was in his seventies. Yeah, seventy four I think, okay, but a fit seventy four. Yeah, I think when they first went missing, people thought, oh, two seventy year olds, you know, there's fallen off their chair. Yeah, and you go no, no, no. He was quite a tough dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. What about Carol.

Carol was into like she had been president of the country Women's Association or a very high office holder. She was very much part of the community. She was someone who always helped other people, wanted to volunteer for you know, this, that and the other. Always active. If she wasn't out helping other people in her community, she was at home, you know, cooking for various fates and things like that. So he was someone who always was giving to other

I saw I think it was on sixty minutes where her younger sister was in the viewed and described her as a larger than life personality, always happy, always, always buddly, looking for funding, funding life. Yeah, the circumstances. If we talk about the case, I'll just relay what I know and knew, add the color to it that it was a campsite that was found abandoned. That was basically the genesis of the investigation on the back of reports to the police that Carol and Russell were missing.

Yes, it actually started with Russell's by Robin, who reported him missing when he hadn't checked in on the high frequency radio for about four or five nights in a row, and Rob Ashton who was the sort of key figure in that group of radio enthusiasm. He talked to Robin and said, something's not right here. So she went to the police and she didn't know at that stage that Carol was with Russell, so she just reported Russell missing.

That's what I was. What I would say on that, Greg, it's amazing and we'll break it, break it all down. But these are the type of things that come out when you start looking into people's lives. It doesn't surprise me, like you're going to a murder investigation in the country town and you uncover all sorts of things when you sort of lift the blanket and go, okay, what's going on here in this town? So we'll put it out there. They'd been they'd been friends for a long time. They had what came out.

In court, and I I like to be my viewer version of having a respect for the families is that I don't go I don't want to go beyond what came out in the court case and the testimony they go, I think that's fair. Everything else, I view is irrelevant to the case. And it was the investigation in the case that mostly the book was about. But what what you know was presented at court was that Russell and Carroll had known each other at school when were teenagers.

Okay, now when we talk camping, because we're sitting here in the sort of in a city Sydney suburb, to appreciate the wilderness of the area in which they disappeared, and you talk CB radios and communication. When they go in there.

They're off grid, completely off grid. It is, it is really remote.

Can you describe it to people that might have been to locations like that?

Look, it's you can only get in there with the four will drive, so and you would be generally, unless you're a very experienced four wall driver, you'd be unwise to go in on your own, just because anything could happen and you could be lost forever. It's the the our Pine. The One and Gata Valley is a small part of the Alpine National Park and the Alpine National Park which is pretty much entirely off grid, entire no phone reception.

Nothing.

There is huge, you know in the book, I say it's bigger than Belgium.

Or about the same.

And you don't just go there for a picnic on a Sunday.

You've got the plan. You have to plan.

Yes, Applies Russell had a chainsaw with him in case he needed to you know, you know she often did have to cut to clear tracks.

Don't you carry that in your card?

Funnily enough, no, so you know, spare petrol, water, food supplies, tent, the area for the radio. Everything had to be there. He was very well prepared and most people who go into that valley to camp in the want to go a valley, go in very prepared, right.

Russell's wife would be comforted by the fact that she would often hear him call in at six o'clock if he's out there with his crew of radio, with.

His crew of radio enthusiasts, and she knew how to turn the radio on at home and would always listen in. She didn't have the license to use it as such, but she would always switch it on and listen and make sure he was okay, and he knew that she'd be listening okay.

So after a couple of days she hadn't heard from him, and then that's when she went to the police. What was the initial response from the police. How did they treat that?

They treated it pretty seriously right from the beginning, the uniform police, I think partly because they knew that was a remote area and it was if he had been for years, pretty religious about, you know, checking in on the radio. Missing five or six days is serious. So they went up there the following day. A couple of

So they're at that location, they're confronted the remote location, they're confronted with Russell's car, abandoned and the tent burnt out and all the camping gear thrown into thrown into the tent. Yeah, a fairly chaotic, chaotic saint you it's hard to interpret what's happened there? Yeah, where do you start? Where do you start?

And you know, at the beginning there was always because by then they did know that he'd been camping with Carol and that had been an affair that the Hill family didn't know about. And so they're thinking, well, is have they run.

Off stage there? At stage?

There disappearance somehow? But how it had to be another car somewhere and who was that? If not, what had happened? Where were they? Had they just gone walking and got lost? But if that was the case, who burnt the camp? Were they missing? Were they dead?

Who? No one knew? Do you know what area of the police were handling? It was a local police or when did it get passed up the line to more of a major investigation.

Was handled initially by well that the first people who arrived there were uniform cops from MAFRA. Then it went to Sale and the local detectives at Sale and that first person in charge of that was Amy Frost and it was with the local detectives at sale for about two to three weeks. But the Missing person squad, and as saying the book that a lot of people think missing persons and you think, well, there's you know, hundreds of those.

A year.

And the missing person squad itself in Victoria is a division of homicide. If foul players suspected and there is no body, then it's a missing person squad. If there is a body, it's homicide. So the Missing person Squad knew about this pretty early.

They were have an overview, they'd.

Have an overview, they were looking at it. They were staying in the loop. And after about two or three weeks when the first search and rescue found absolutely nothing.

So they on that. I would imagine their pole air and the four of the drives and.

Looking they had and they were they were going out as you would from the campsite and within one hundred meters you're in very dense bush, et cetera. So they went five ten k's you know, out that, and they had some horsemen from the from the valley. They had I think kadava dogs from New South Wales or something like that, and they were all looking in that you know, five ten, fifteen, twenty k circumference from the campsite and found not nothing, not a not a shoe, not a jumper,

What do we do? We've done the search, we go from here? Where do we go from here? So the Missing Person Squad they took over the investigation and then what I remember it from the media, I'm assuming it was early it started getting released in the appeals through the media. Yeah, if anyone seen these.

So the head of the Missing person Squad, Andrew Stamper, he had a media a stand up as they call it, a day after the Missing Person Squad had officially been given the case. And that was the first I said, Well, the only thing we can do is try and identify everyone who had been in the valley.

Makes sense, Yeah, but that in itself is Yeah, it's not signing into the local club.

No, yeah, no, it's not easy at all. So it had to be an appeal to the public please come forward. This was at a point in time where the first COVID restrictions had just come into play and people thought they are they trying to catch us for being out when we should have been at home.

Who's paranoid? I'm not.

So they had to say, look, don't worry about that.

We're not going to try and.

With COVID regulations, we just need to find out who was in the valley, okay. And they were looking for people who would have taken photos on their phone. He might have had dash cam on there in their car, anyone who could help them figure out all the people who'd actually been in there.

And I would suppose at that stage they don't know if it's stephed by misadventure or they still didn't know, like it wandered off, they had a fight, they wandered off. You just don't you don't know, and it's still the proof of life checks weren't showing anything up, so they were starting to think it was more likely for out play. But it was another few weeks before they could say, look, so the bank accounts haven't been used, used phones, and.

Carol's phone was never found. Russell's phone it was about two or three weeks after the camp site was found. They did get records back from Telstra that his phone had connected to the the Dargo the Dinner Planes mobile station in the Hotham station, then Mount Buffalo, so they knew his phone had been in those three range of those three towers for about twenty thirty minutes or so. But who knows what that means?

Well, that's yeah, okay the strongest you know, someone has taken them.

Has taken the fun Yeah, yeah, that's all. He's got the phone or someone else has. Did they just find it somewhere and then just drive out and throw it away? Where exactly is it?

So not a lot to go on. And I know that the way you've delved into the book and a couple of things that the police started looking at and looking at it really trying to work out the hypothesis of what had happened. What were some of the significant events where they thought, okay, this is foul play. When do you think they formed that beer? They?

I guess when they really looked at what had been thrown inside the tent to get burned, they were like the whole gas barbecue thing, et cetera, the things that and the gas bottles themselves.

It didn't look likely.

That that Russell and Carroll had burnt that camp site themselves. You didn't know why you would do that. Why would you put everything inside the tent and then burn everything down together? And so just as a hypothesis, they thought that someone who's done that is trying to destroy any any record of them being there. And even the fact that they couldn't find any fingerprints or anything gone to that X gone to that extent that they gone, someone's done a really good job of cleaning this site up.

I'm trying to put my homicide hat on and thinking, Okay, if you're looking at that, was it an accident that happened? Then it certainly didn't look my interpretation of the crime scene like it was an accident. Someone was someone had done it deliberately. So it's giving you something to work with on that factor. People identifying people would have come forward, and I'm sure the public would have fawned in and

They were dealing with some sightings around about there was you know, we think we saw Russell and Carroll and another place just about thirty forty kilometers away, and they had quite a few of those which they could, and at your job is to follow all of them up just in case. But they all proved explicable by other means.

So just to explain to us city dwellers, like weed sprays in the yeah, I actually you're talking like you grew up in the high country, yeah sprays. No, I haven't.

And in fact, I had a completely wrong view of them when I first heard that as well. And it wasn't until you know, you hear their full evidence that you go, oh, I see, so you're not walking around with a little plastic thing on.

Your back like you are in your backyard.

They go in there with full wall drives, with massive trucks that have hoses hundreds of meters long, and huge tanks of three different sprays for blackberries, for ox Hie daisies and cape brewm not just that they're trying to eliminate over a thirty kilometer square kilometer area massive, So that's why they're there for a whole week, so they know the area well, and they know the area would.

Yeah, people had come through, and we're not talking a huge amount of people coming through, are we No.

In the end, there might have been, you know, twenty fifteen, twenty twenty five, something like that, most of whom had snaps from where they camped, et cetera. The first one that they sort of from memory, the first one they sat back and went, well, that's interesting. It was a

People drive and turned around and turned back.

Yeah, so they camped there and at two am someone else had driven up, had realized that that gate was closed and had had to do like a fifteen to twenty point U turn and go back again down through the valley. And that report and they thought so the same night that this camp was burnt. They knew from when it had first been found that that fire had happened sometime around about ten o'clock to midnight.

Okay, we've been a narrow time timeframe.

And here at two am there was a four well drive trying to get out of the north end of the valley, not being able to do so you turning and driving back again when almost no one drives at that time, at that time of the night. So that's the first time they thought a bit suspicious, bit suspicious. It had no idea what the car was, but it sort of fitted the hypothesis that they were building, that someone else had burnt that and then someone else was trying to get out of the valley.

And that gate where the roadway was blocked off. How far are we looking from the camp site? Ten k Yeah, on a rough to rain, on a rough terrain. Yeah.

But then if they had to go back through the wan to go of and then down through the rest of the Ourpine National Park to get to Dargo High Planes Road, that was like a six eight hour full will drive over really rough tracks in the middle of the night.

Okay, dark. So the assumption and this is this is this is really getting into That's what I liked about the book. So that's what you're presented with. It's not evidence on itself. Someone came to a gate that was closed and did a U turn. But at that time of night and in those conditions, why didn't the person like out there just stay there.

Just stay there and can yeah figure wait till the morning.

Yeah, you're not. It's not a matter of oh, I'll go ten kilometers down the track and be back in the civilization. No, Okay. So that they're they're the type of things that I just find fascinating with homicide investigations that that just doesn't seem normal. There was a couple of other let's call them persons of interest that the police looked at my understanding and somewhere with Eastern Europe and.

Shoot, they did know, yeah, and again from a couple of people in the valley and weed sprays again were one of them. That there had been two people whose accident made them sound like they were Eastern European who were there to hunt, had asked where they could hunt, were armed, had guns, were a bit crazy drivers, you know, driving fast down through the valley, and a slight yahoo

Time, Okay, Yeah, And that and the fact that you can't find them causes you cause you to make Yeah, why can't why can't they find them? Why haven't they come forward? That type of thing. And there was also which is not unique to this investigation, but someone that was sort of living off the grid, hermit type character and what was what was his story?

So he's he was known as the button man Button because he made buttons out of deerhorns. He would often be known to be in the in the wan and Gata Valley or in the Arpine National Park in camp there for two, three, four or five months at a time, and there were stories about him going back several years.

But he.

On the one hand, he didn't have a known history of violence toward campus, but he did several scary things. And his ability to sort of to their camps at night time and you know, use their equipment, take photos, et cetera, without them knowing he'd ever been there, just gave people he that was.

I think you've reminded me of something in the book where people have woken up and he's been there taking a fato on the camera.

He's taken a selfie on their phone of him holding a knife inside their tent while they're asleep.

Why would that freak terrified?

So so he did things like that to try and scare people away, and it is pretty scary, but there was there was no evidence he had actually gone further than that, and and in the end, they took a while to find him. And you know, as I say in the book, one of the things I hadn't quite you know, because you hear in the abbreviated form when you get the evidence laid down the train and go, oh, we checked him with the with the button man, and

One inculpatory or exculpatory. Yees, yeah, here's my faint. So how did Greg Lynn come into the picture? How did he?

While they were while I was still thinking about the report of the the car that hadne you turned and driven back through the at two am, they were going back to the Telstra records and they'd asked telt if they could have any more details on they All they knew was what towels that phone had connected to. You can actually find an awful lot of detail out about phones, but you need to do the math and that can take ages. You know, you've got to find people for

So these are cameras in the middle of nowhere that focusing on the.

Roadway, facing on the roadway. They're not vic Roads cameras. They're just on the Great Alpine Road, you know, way up in northern Victoria. And well, who's those? And then they realized they were the Hotham Resort cameras, and Hotham used them to make sure that, you know, people didn't try and escape without paying. Okay, So they and there's there's there's one set to the left of Dargo Highplanes

The towers that town.

And although they needed a lot more math before they could stand up and court and say we know the phone was in that car, it was a good enough guess to go, well, it's a strong likelihood if there was a car going through the cameras at that time.

Now they didn't know.

There could have been ten cameras going through, sorry, ten cars going through the cameras at that time fifteen twenty who knew. As it happened at that hour on Saturday morning, and this is just before the first lockdown, there was only one car that had driven up Dargo Highplanes Road and left in the Great Airpine Road and that was Gregg.

Okay, So they had the number plate, They had the.

Number plate from the number plate recognition camera system. They ran the check and it was a guy called Greg Lynn who lived in Carolyn Springs, who they'd never heard of before in their lives, and they went, who's this.

So, looking at it from a police point of view, you get that name and you'd start to have a look, who is this person? So let's describe Greg what the police would have known about him in the early times.

Well, what they found out about him was that he was living there with his second wife and the kids from the first marriage and the second marriage were there a nice upper middle class home in suburban Melbourne. He worked for Jetstar. He was a check pilot, which is a very high position. You're the guy who checks that all the other pilots are doing the right job, so very high paying. It was somewhere three fifty four hundred grand a year, very high paying, white collar job. Professional.

What? What could it mean?

What what?

What possible motive? What possible motive could he have? And yet you know, it looked like they couldn't yet prove it, but it looked like Russell's Fonne had been in his car, and you.

Go, well, you could just have easily just picked it up. You don't know until until you speak, until you speak to it. Yeah, And so that's why the July fourteenth date, I'd never read it again and again and again. That's when they decided to do what you know, as you would know, the first step is in a lot of investigations, which is just go talk to someone, ask them what they were doing, listen to them, get them to commit to a story, and then come back and see can we corroborate it?

Yeah, we're talking about that before we sat down for the podcast. And that's that's a there's a gray area like, I thought, that's quite reasonable that we've got his car going through a camera, we've got details of the phone that haven't been confirmed. I wouldn't calling him a suspect. Person of interest might be the different level, and that becomes a debate, that becomes a big point down the track, Well what do you mean by a person of interest?

All they knew was his car had been on the Great Our Plane Road, and so all they were asking him to do was can you just let us know your movements for those a few days.

What did he provide to them at that time?

Very cool, very calm, He said, yeah, yeah, he'd gone, He said, I left here. I think it was on the Monday, camped up at how It Planes, which is the last big camping spot before you head down into the one and Gata valley in our Pine National Park. He'd gone into one and Gate of Valley. He'd camped somewhere on the Wednesday night, and he's ever, he was never terribly specific about where that was up in the

Knew, and hard to fact check as well, very.

Hard to fact check because he gave them he said he hadn't he hadn't met anybody, hadn't communicated with anybody. He was just enjoying his own company, camping and hunting in the One and go A valley.

And just let's talk the hunting for a sec too, because that's a big part of it that people in the city mightn't appreciate. But a lot of hunters go down there.

That's that's a lot of the reason for going.

Yeah.

Yeah, So some of them, like Russell and Carroll go just to be in the wilderness and the bush. At least half of them were there to hunt, and that's allowed. You know, you need the proper license, so you need a hunter's license, and you need a gun license, and the park rangers to check that. They check Greg he had done two shotguns with him. He had a ruga rifle and his breath and Arms shotgun. But that wasn't unusual. It's not like that's a red flag because half the people there.

It's like, if they were there in the ski season, why are you here because I'm skiing? Yeah? Yeah, So it leaves them in a difficult position, doesn't it. With that the other thing that came from that, and again it was in your book, but again the thinking, and that's where I like the way that you're getting inside the mind of police investigating matters like that. They turned up under the out Citi's place, so it was like put him on notice. Hey, but you can't find him,

He was very calm, and he explained it all without missing a beat.

Yeah, so he wasn't rattled, not rattled at all, Because there are signs that you look out for. If I knock on the door to speak the greg and I suspect you of a crime, and.

You're there and I'm going fuck, and you run out the.

Back shaking as you're trying to drink a glass of water, I'd be going, okay, well something's going on.

But there was none of that, none of that. And even when they noticed he painted his car and asked about that, I was just a lockdown project, you know, through some bush brushes at my son's and to get the outside and we painted the car.

See that in itself, if a car has been involved in a crime, I'm thinking, okay. If they tried to change the car, but he weaved in a story, that's almost like there'd be a I can imagine in the incident room with the cops. There be a debate going WORLL did strange stuff when we're lockdown in lockdown, and that played the big part too. Just for the investigation. I can only imagine what they were going through with people working from home and trying to keep this guy.

Yeah, and that one, you know, when they knocked on his on his door, was about four or five days into the into the second lockdown, which was the big one, went for about one hundred and eleven days, So it was a very surprising visit and he was completely unrattled. So you walk away going, well, was he involved or not? Yeah, Now, when you're in court two years later, in hindsight, you go with all you had all the clues to put

And I as I was reading through the book, I'm thinking, that's reasonable, that's reasonable. I'm looking at it every step that they're taking. I was quite impressed by some of the stuff they were doing as an investigation. We might take a break here and leave the listeners as confused as the police were at that particular time, absolutely as